If you’ve worked in sales- especially business to business sales- for more than 5 minutes, you likely know all about big, cold calling/email campaigns.
If you haven’t- it usually goes something like this:
- Someone buys a list of contact information.
- The list gets handed off to a salesperson, who is supposed to turn those leads into money.
- The salesperson sends out barrage after barrage of cold calls, emails, LinkedIn requests, whitepapers, etc.
- The response rate is dismal, say 1 in 50 (if the sales team is motivated and talented). With a target of say, 500 contacts per week- you’re looking at a best case scenario of 10 responses per week. Of those 10, the best sales teams will probably get a sale out of 1, maybe 2 respondents.
1 sale per week, 500 cold calls. That’s 0.2%.
Sound familiar?
It sucks, but hey- that’s sales, right? Wrong. Sales shouldn’t be boiled down into a soulless numbers game. While it’s nice for a company to think in rigid targets like 0.2% per week, it’s not realistic. The hidden costs from turnover, customer satisfaction, and brand image can be catastrophic in a cutthroat sales organization like this. Here’s an example of what I mean-
I once had a friend who tried to get me into door-to-door sales. This is even less efficient than cold calling, but it does have the advantage of allowing for a face-to-face interaction, albeit a hostile one. He described how his team was the top in the company because they were able to close over a hundred deals in a few months. His team had over 10 people on it. They worked 12 hour days, 6 days a week in the hottest months of the summer- knocking on door after door, neighborhood after neighborhood. The salespeople who survived the summer were hardened, cutthroat professionals who would use any tactic (ethics be damned) to make a sale.
Their customers hated them. Things got so bad at one point, they had to overhaul the company branding from top to bottom after some bad press began to hurt their sales numbers.
Their salespeople were really talented, but they were also really stupid. The company lived on a turn-and-burn cycle of continuous sales need. If you sucked as an employee, you didn’t make any money and you left (or got fired). If you complained as a customer, you didn’t get any service until you eventually left.
Let me suggest a better way, starting way back at the top with that cold-call list:
- Someone buys a list. The list is relevant and timely to what is being sold.
- Someone hands that list off to the salesperson- who spends some time researching and identifying needs for a few targets per week.
- The needs identified, the salesperson sends out targeted, personal messaging including cold calls, emails, and etc until the contact responds with a yes or a no. The salesperson is careful not to be pushy- just consistently helpful.
- Anyone who says no is left alone.
- Anyone who says yes is treated as a business partner- with benefits flowing in both directions to make the sale.
- Anyone who doesn’t respond is followed up with forever until they respond.
In this scenario, a salesperson may still only get a sale from 1/10 respondents- but that’s ok! Rather than burning through 500 contacts per week with a sale rate of 0.2% (and likely some very poor customer service), he only contacts 10 people per week. He spends the time it takes to build a business relationship and is consistent and kind in his follow up’s. His efforts still yield him 1 sale per week, but that sale is much more likely to have a positive experience and buy from him again (with little/no effort). Soon he has a customer base of consistent buyers who take very little effort to maintain. He’s happy because he get’s paid more and more as time goes on (and he doesn’t turn into a cutthroat sales monster). The company is happy because their revenue increases, and their overall hit rate is closer to 10% rather than 0.2%.
Need more convincing? Check out SalesGravy’s take on it here.
Let’s recap- which is better?
Giant cold-call campaign of soul-less number hitting, with a 0.2% success rate- or a focused, targeted sales campaign of consistent, relationship-building follow-up’s (with a hit rate of 10%)?
Christian McCall 